


Formless and Form

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Fluff without Plot, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Meld, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 09:46:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9174658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: “He poisoned himself?” Two times Eris and Toland needed to talk about the weapons they built together.





	

  
  
    Every morning, she remembered Crota. The Hive were her second or third thought, and the first were all impressions: the cold coming in through her woven blanket, the yellow light and blue sky outside the Tower. Eris Morn did not want to move, but she heard a Ghost buzz around her, and turned over to press her face against the cot.  
  
    “What?” she muttered.  
  
    “You’re needed in the City,” the Ghost said with concern.  
  
    “Why?”’  
  
    “Please. It is important. Please attend.”  
  
    Eris dragged her arm from underneath herself and rubbed at her bleary eyes while she reached her other hand toward the Ghost. She found it just as she sat up, her fingers fitting comfortably around the flanges. The Ghost buzzed slightly as she held it, in the same kind of mock affront she had seen cats perform. She swung her legs off the cot and held the Ghost to her chest, grounding herself with its buzzing for a moment before opening her eyes.  
  
    The Ghost was pale green, with a chipped flange, and her own Ghost was sitting on her low bedside table with its light lit.  
  
    “Ampilyne,” Eris whispered, and let go. The Ghost darted out of her hands almost as fast as she had moved her fingers. “Sorry. Sorry!”  
  
    “Some people would have screamed,” said Toland’s Ghost.  
  
    “Then they would not have had as much composure as you,” Eris’ Ghost said to the other, then turned to Eris. “We should probably go. If one of your teammates calls, it’s important.”  
      
_If Toland calls, it’s probably a puzzle difficult to work out._ As she stared at her Ghost in tired disbelief, though, she couldn’t help but feel that the small, glowing eye saw through her skepticism to her intrigue. Ampilyne hovered, making occasional nervous jumps. Toland had been with her team for long enough now that he felt like a part of it, if one who balanced his usefulness with the burdensome fact of his cryptic and irritable personality. She had spent a lot of time scoffing privately about him - about his words, about the strange machinery he carried, about the blind grace of his always-gloved hands.  
  
    She raised an incredulous eyebrow at her Ghost.  
  
    “It is Ampilyne, though. You know how it is.” The Ghost did not sound certain. Although she would have had to hunt for years to find the reason for such a hunch, she was also almost certain it was gently mocking her.  
  
    Eris threw the blanket over her shoulder and went toe-to-nonexistent-toe with Ampilyne, who buzzed slightly away. As soon as she thought about holding Ampilyne she felt her cheeks heat up. Toland was known for recording his own frenzied studies, Eriana’s more measured research, and the team’s idle conversation. For what reason of pique or posterity, Eris did not know.  
      
    Maybe he had scried this.  
      
    Ampilyne said again, “You’re needed in the city.”  
  
    Eris shut her eyes, shook her head and wondered what Eriana would be working on right now, and what could possibly have gone wrong. Corrupted weapons? Thrall in the City? The fear was more familiar than Toland’s Ghost.  
  
    She shooed Ampilyne out the door and began to dress, trying to soothe her mind of the ever-present idea of Crota.

* * *

    Eriana was pacing in the book-crowded flat when Eris arrived, her guns and her Ghost hidden under her moss-green cloak. The energy of the Sun moved gently around her, stirred up but not aflame. Ampilyne had taken his own path, and Eriana reacted to him first.  
  
    She watched the Ghost buzz around the front room, her eye lights bright and narrow. Her voice was clipped, stressed, and Eris drew herself up under her cloak, unsure whether Eriana needed a staunch soldier or a sympathetic friend.  
  
    “I’m glad the Ghost found you,” Eriana said. “Toland has poisoned himself with some smithing ritual and needs the antidote.”  
  
    “His Ghost can’t …”  
  
    Eriana and Ampilyne dimmed their lights at the same time. Eriana moved toward the door, one hand hovering, calm, near her sidearm. “It needs to be a Warlock who undoes the wards at his hangar, and I know the instructions.”  
  
    Eris wanted to ask why she of all people had been called, but she thought she knew - she was not as competitive as Omar or impatient as Tarlowe or as suspicious of Toland as Sai. A bit suspicious, yes, but she was good at hiding her distrust. Naked distrust wasn’t a useful thing to display in front of its object in this particular case.  
  
    Eris nodded. “What else do I need to know?”  
  
    “Toland will keep to himself. Make sure no one we don't know comes in while he’s … like this.”  
  
    “He _poisoned_ himself?”  
  
    Eriana ran her hand over her forehead. “That’s how he explained it, anyway, with that condescending tone like he’s telling a half-truth for the sake of simplicity.”  
  
    Behind Eriana, Ampilyne disappeared through the closed door in the back wall. Maybe Eris would just sit in the front room until Eriana came back.  
  
    For the first time, Eriana focused and met Eris’s eyes. She gripped the Hunter’s shoulder, the Sun stirring Eris’s hair. “You’ll be okay, right?”  
  
    “Yes,” Eris said, and meant it. She had half-expected to be flying to the moon right now, unprepared and half-armored, so staying in the flat felt like a pleasant if momentary respite.  
  
    Eriana swept out the door, radiating.  
  
    Eris sat on the sagging couch.  
  
    How many times had she sat here, with her fireteam surrounding her? On some days, the place felt like a mustering hall, or like a target. If Crota attacked the City, Eris’s most horrible and most selfish fears said, he would rain green fire down on this spot first. The Vanguard, too, would turn a bright and dangerous eye on the fireteam if they knew that Eriana planned to breach the Hive-pit. Now, though, the flat felt more like a shelter than a bull’s-eye. Although she knew that it was a fickle thought, part of her mind was telling her still-groggy body that Crota couldn’t get her here.  
  
    She spent a few minutes looking at her feet, then pulling books off the shelves with unnecessary violence. Scraps of words on dusty pages seemed hugely significant to her life at this very moment, even if they had nothing to do with it: _Brown lichen grows on the sunward facing side of cliffs in the taiga._ Another book: _The universe’s way of pursuing equilibrium._ Another: _In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves, around the chapel._

    Maybe it was because of these, or because of the faint traces of the Sun-Light which had not left when Eriana did, that she went to the door in the back and didn’t knock. Instead she pushed the door open the width of her foot and said “Hmm?”  
  
    The room spelled like potting soil. Eris remembered, from the last time that Toland had sat in there and shouted out instead of joining the team around the couch, that the exile had commandeered a desk and the bed, which was allegedly available to any member of the team who wanted to stay the night and was willing to remove Toland to the couch in order to do it.  
  
    In the days since she had last seen him, Toland must have moved more of his belongings into the room. Bundles of plants, some dry and brown and some alive and looping around twine, hung from rusting loops of metal screwed into the ceiling. A potted plant on the desk had climbed up the twine to the ceiling, crawling half way across the ceiling of the narrow room.  
  
    There had always been books and maps piled in the shelves on the desk. Now there was a gun, too, a rifle with garish purple paint and workmanlike lines. There were vertebra and cords scattered around it, and now Eris noticed that there were bones threaded into the makeshift arbor too, bird skulls and what might be keel bones.  
      
    Toland said “Hmm?” back at her, trailing off in exaggerated despair, and Eris opened the door the rest of the way out of irritation. She had to see what had merited such self-pity.  
  
    Toland was covered in both of the apartment’s woven quilts. He still wore his black cloak; Eris could tell because he had kicked one leg out from under the blankets at some point, showing a corner of the cloak and a bare, bony foot. She stood with her back to the desk as if it was a bunker she could retreat to.  
  
    Physically, Toland did not look more ill than usual. Pale and high-cheeked, he was always a bit of a death’s head. The dark bruises under heavy-lidded green eyes were not unusual either. The Light, though.  
      
    His presence usually felt strange, threaded through with some withheld rottenness, but now his Light was dim, as if he was hardly in the room at all. She had to blink her eyes to be sure. Would he have a pulse, now? Ampilyne materialized near his right shoulder.  
  
    “You did this to yourself,” Eris muttered, certain.  
  
    Toland leaned back to show her his throat, and she could not tell whether he was in pain or luxuriating in the attention. Her own ambivalence to the difference disgusted and unsettled her. “Such experiments have been conducted before. Light-sickness.”  
  
    “No wonder.” She looked at the hanging plants, the picked-clean bones. “What will cure you?”  
  
    “At the hangar I have herbs and artifacts. The noble Eriana has gone questing for them.”  
  
    Eris appreciated that Toland hadn’t implied that he’d ordered Eriana to go.  
  
    The Light flowed around him in thin rivulets, from the cot to the desk to the hanging plants. Toland pulled his foot back under the blankets. Eris knew Arc light best, and felt Toland’s Sun as a power less refined than Eriana’s. Instead of warming, it burned and gathered in strange coronae.  
  
    He must have felt her inquiry, or wanted to fill the silence that had grown while she had kept her eyes on the desk while her mind explored. “My Light isn’t gone. You’re walking all around it.”  
  
    She flinched, a bodily reaction she had not expected and immediately wanted to separate herself from. She’d never felt Light like this before, though, and the idea of walking within its strange orbit was like an unexplored road - there might be danger there, but she was prepared for it. Would there be any value in telling him that she was curious about it?  
  
    “Were you using it for that project?”  
  
    “Yes.”  
  
    “A scout rifle?”  
  
    “A pulse rifle, although the body is not as important as …” He coughed in thick, dry barks. When he spoke next it was in a quiet rasp. Eris moved closer to hear. Her own legs felt weak, so that it was comforting to sit with her legs crossed, her knees brushing the mattress, while Toland turned his back to her.  
  
    “The Light,” he said.  
  
    “So that’s what wounded you.” As soon as she knew, the lines of Light became more vivid. The gun was still pulling at him. He had brought the plants in to serve as a smoke screen, or as an unwitting sacrifice, to distract whatever black hole of Light he had concocted from the life around it. They would die for his plans. She sent her own Light sliding along the lines, mapping the frayed connections. At the gun it weakened, sparking against Darkness and a small, dense core of potential and hope. There at the core of the half-made gun was something like a perpetual motion machine, a knot of precariously balanced Light in Darkness. Her vision gently blurred as she focused on the ribbons of Light, on the small plants, on what she could do to mend the frayed lines.  
  
    Toland turned onto his back and looked at her. “The antidote will restore that energy,” he muttered, but he was also only paying attention to his Light-sense, his eyes and his voice unfocused.  
  
    The dark knot was drawing more and more of Eris’s attention. There were paths to walk there, caves unexplored, dark, smooth places like nests in which to sleep.  
  
    “I do not need … ” Toland was saying, but Eris had already figured out where she could string Light between his tattered web and heal some of the troubled air of the room. Ampilyne and her Ghost floated in curious, concerned orbits around the desk, but she did not heed them.  
  
    Toland sat up, got his legs under him and crouched as if to stand and move toward the desk. His presence in the web only increased Eris’ understanding of it, so that when she gestured him down her perception of the world moved even further away, the Tower and the City and the hanging vines all equally distant and equally intimate, all part of the web of the Light. She kept putting puzzle pieces together, shocking life into the tiny ash-lines of his dying Light. A breeze rustled the hanging vines and sparked.  
  
    The Light eddied more carefully around the gun now, more willing to look into its skull-eyes. Healthier, Eris thought, although she too had contributed to pulling life from a living thing to a dead thing.  
  
    “You could have brought me some water,” he said, “instead of interfering in the delicate machinery of this web that I have woven.”  
  
    Exhausted but happy, Eris gestured disinterest.  
  
    Toland tried to stand. Either his knees were weak or he was dizzy; either one felt like the natural state of the world right now, as if Eris was surrounded by the fog of the sickness herself. Toland sank back sideways on the cot and Eris reached out to touch his shoulders, so that it was natural for him to lean back against her and rest his head on the field-cloth just above her armored knee. The two Ghosts circled.  
  
    “This isn’t for your records,” Eris muttered, some memory of the reality of her team’s foibles coming back.    
  
    Toland scratched uselessly at the pillow a few times before finally grasping the top and plopping it in front of Ampilyne. The Ghost chirped a few times, then alighted and sat still. If Toland was concerned for Eris’ Ghost, he didn’t say it.  
  
    Instead, he shut his eyes and swept his weak and aging Light toward the gun. “The gun drives itself. I have placed a bit of living Darkness inside, and when it is complete it will not fail its wielder even in the darkest of places. I sacrifice this Light for that alone, Eris.”  
  
    “For that alone?”  
  
    “And because the weapons of the Darkness have things to teach us. Do you expend yourself for this task as well? It is honorable work with a dishonorable mask. How sharp are Hunter eyes, to see through it!”  
  
    Was that what she had done? Seen brightness in the core of the dark? No. “You can’t help us when you’re this weak.”  
  
    “No. But this is a temporary strife.” He sat up again and scratched at the back of his neck, then lay down again on the bare cot next to the Ghost. “Eriana will return. And that …” A shake of his head toward the bones lashed to the gun on the desk. “Is ours. We have built something together now, no matter how … accidental your contributions.”  
  
    “Will they be able to tell?”  
  
    “Will Eriana suss out your interference? I don’t think so. She knows exactly what I do here. I do not think she’ll bend close enough to smell you on it.”  
  
    She didn’t regret giving him her Light, she thought with thrilling terror. She could quicker imagine him owing her than him betraying the team. She could quicker imagine him thanking her, and reaching out to touch her hair. Maybe there would be other projects, other twinings of Light and Light in the miasma of Darkness which she was now beginning to feel again was not in all the City but just in this room, piled like blankets.  
  
    Eris stood and fled.  
  
    Until Eriana returned she sat on the couch with her legs under her and read a history of the City, reminding herself of the many things people had survived in the dark times before her dark times, interrogating the City’s biases, watching its business-owners squabble in the pages over maps and boundary lines. _  
_

* * *

 

    Years later, Eris and Toland had both given more in the service of the Light and more to the loyalty of one another. Years later she would not hesitate to help him, but it was a more confident and more measured help. He was a ghost and she was dying, scarred by her own hands and by the pit from which they both escaped. He was a ghost and he knew, through some other sense, that some other Ghost was working on Bad Juju without a by-your-leave.  
  
    “Ornaments?"  
  
    “A new invention. Drawn from the Iron Lords, I believe, and their legacy of snow and skins."  
  
    Toland tisked, a sound which Eris found unaccountably funny when it came from the incorporeal pillar of fog standing in her room.  
  
    Toland had gotten his wish, had fallen and torn himself open on the sharp edge of the universe and survived with the burn-blast scars of it. He was ghostly when the Light burned and more comprehensible at night, when the Guardians' own burning was dulled by sleep or distance. Toland was the antithesis of a moth to a flame, despite his admiration for the Hive’s dusty and scaled majesty.  
  
    And so he visited, pretending with exaggerated dignity not to concern himself with whether Eris was there or not.  
  
    Tonight she had retired early, and tonight she had retired angry - hurt by the mutterings of Guardians who had not visited her, who scoffed with ignorance. (Toland scoffed with knowledge, and was there a difference in the tone, the sibilance? People in the Tower still were warm to her - she spoke to Amanda or Ikora or the several Guardians with whom she had gained a rapport. Almost three years from the Hellmouth, though, and people forgot. People imagined that she tore at her own skin so as not to forget her wounds, so as not to come unawares again upon the same terror that had first made them. An insistence on progress, though, did not always include a denial of history, and the Guardians had begun to forget that the Hive were more than crowds of thralls with which to collect on small-coin bounties.  
  
    So when she asked, “What do you want?” of the pillar of Darkness, she only half needed an answer.  
  
    Toland’s face was a mess: now eyes, now dark fog like scribbles on a map, now skin like he had worn in the safe house. “Only time.”  
  
    Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, like a word floating in the Dark with its own weight. All of them had wanted more time. Eriana especially had clawed for it, had dragged until the dirt of it clotted thick between the joints of her fingers. Eriana had demanded that Crota give the Earth more time, and then that the very flow of time in his world change.  
  
    “We never had enough time,” Eris said. “Now, I cast my mind to space more often.”  
  
    Toland gave a small nod. The little bit of clarity showed on his face, made him a creature corporeal enough to have to step across the white floor. “That is an answer almost as true as the other. Consider the throne worlds. Each is connected to each by a portal, but each is ascendent in the same way, the same energy flowing to them, the same … sit down. There. There.”  
  
    She crossed her legs in the middle of the floor.  
  
    She thought that he might have been going to use her as the centerpiece of a diagram, as the gravitational center of some strange system, but instead he took up the rest of the room and seemed to ignore her physical presence, ranging around her in widening circles.  
  
    “Savathûn, queen of spaces, watches each to each with eyes that flay the language she witnesses.”  
  
    “She cannot hear you here.”  
  
    “No. No.” His voice had gone soft, like the dripping of water in a far-away cave. The fervor of his  call bled off him like the smoke, leaving him human-shaped and cold, with Eris’ eyes. “The courts turn their backs, sometimes, and have learned to armor their soft places.”  
  
    So, he felt that he was being ignored.  
  
    “Come here,” Eris said.  
  
    His silence was full of questions; she could tell from the way he tipped his head, from the brightening of one bulbous eye. After a requisite moment of consideration he circled her again, his feet clicking softly as if his smoking boots were real gear instead of some strange mix of Darkness and manifested flesh.  
  
    He crouched in front of her, skeptical, bending close enough that she felt her heart jump. “What do _you_ want, my dearest Eris?”  
  
    She reached for his collar. The tattered facsimile of a Warlock cloak was fibrous and solid, or at least deigned to be that way while she pulled a handful toward her. He lurched closer but did not fall and did not touch her. No breath, no movement of his chest under the thick fabric, no smell from his scornful mouth.  
  
    “Do you remember the day you were sick?” Eris said. “Do you remember what you put yourself through for that gun?”  
  
    He drew away, keeping his gaze locked to her even while he turned over and suddenly lay down on her skirt, snugging the top of his head against her stomach. She looked down on him in awe and startlement. Her vision almost blurred as he moved, but she drew herself back, her skin prickling, while he grinned.  
  
    “I thought you wanted me to be a the gaps in your lost Light,” she whispered, and touched his shoulder while he sighed in her lap.  
  
    Lazily he swatted at her hand, then reached up and with some clumsiness drew his fingers across her lips and jaw, his thumb catching between lip and teeth. The void-stuff prickled in her mouth like poison. “Would you like to be? It is such a critical gravity.”  
  
    She slid her hands into his hair while he brushed the back of his hand against her wet cheek.    
  
    He said, “I would speak your name to the worlds at the top of the world, were its speaking not anathema.”  
  
    “Move, Toland.” She got her hands under his shoulders and pushed. With a wounded look he let himself slide onto the floor while she turned and stretched her legs out, trying to stop them from prickling. She leaned over and kissed him. Instead of protesting he dragged her arm across his chest, bracing her against him so that she leaned into the kiss, catching her breath against skin that felt real, now warm, now intangible like fog.  
  
    “Anathema or anthem,” he whispered, and then the world was her name for a while, her name against her mouth, against her ear, against her throat, until she was surrounded by the whole dark universe of him and he was flickering, bled out by the light of her. He eased back and licked his lips and she followed him, took another kiss that made him keen and squirm. He turned, pressing his cheek against the floor as he flinched away from her.  
  
    She looked down at him, and let the silence sit for a moment. “Would you rather I were Savathûn?”  
  
    He was silent, heaving now with breath that she still could not feel on her face. Then, the words clear but laborious between breaths: “Would you rather I were the stark and truthful Deep, with all its blade-sharp honesty?” The truth of that sank into her like a stone into deep water. The Guardians _did_ whisper. She would tell Toland her own truth now.

    “It was not the Deep that saved us,” she said. “Just you and I.”  
  
    “Not the Light, either.”  
  
    “You and I,” she hissed, and was surprised at the fury of it. She heaved him up by the shoulders again so that his head lolled against her legs. He looked at her with the patient expression he had given his concoctions. She had expected his fury to match hers, and so there was some impression of instability in his calmness, or else a balance, as if they siphoned energy from one another and could not both be furious at once. Toland’s sometimes-fanaticism had slackened into quiescent concern. The difference seemed as unexpected as his madness.    
  
    “Let me tell you of the great love of the Deep.”  
  
    “I think I know it.” Her lips curled in disdain.  
  
    He resettled himself more comfortably in her lap. With his long legs stretched out on the floor he looked like a narrow shadow, his right boot bumping up against the wooden leg of her bed. “I have flown between the black stars. I have walked on silver threads and touched the bones of things not yet dead. And all along the Deep, the embrace of a universe too full of truth for empty praise. The Deep does not lie, Eris, and if you belong to it you are armored against lies and whispers. Each word is proven against this truth and that, _that_ is why the Worm names ring out as they do.”

“Do not speak of Worms.”  
  
    “Of embraces, then? Of worlds wrapped ‘round one another, of the burn behind the black of the universe? Behind everything there is that heat and there is that song.”  
  
    He sang of darkness speckled with stars. He sang of Hive conquests that ripped nebulas apart, that fed greedy black holes with entire fleets. The blue-black sky outside her bedroom window snagged and held her gaze as he spoke of the warm comfort of greater darkness. She drifted, almost asleep, while his voice rose and fell in ugly cracks and poetry.  
  
    When she felt that she had heard enough, she muttered, “You think you know so much.”  
  
    He brushed his hand against her cheek. “Yes, I do.”  
  
    “What action would you have us take? Is there anything useful in this poetry?”  
  
    “We have already made so much. The gun was just the first. But we have made opportunities and treaties and schemes since then, have we not?”  
  
    “It is all still there,” Eris said. “Remember that place? Fuzzy, like a smudged painting, but the place ... must be there? The flat in the city.”  
  
    “I know of no reason why it wouldn’t be.”  
  
    “Eriana’s things. The library …”  
  
    “Can you get there?” He asked.  
  
    “Yes.” She answered immediately. She had gone to the City before, on small quests and pilgrimages, on the journey where she had met the Exo spacer.  
  
    He shook himself, then curled his lip. Wistfulness and revulsion moved over his face fast, chasing one another. “And our weapon?”  
  
    “The Guardian has it.”  
  
    “The Guardian!” He crowd. The sudden loudness surprised her, and she flinched. Toland took his weight from her legs and sat beside her, running one hand from her hip to her knee as if to ground her.  
  
    “Murmur is mine as well, given away.” She shifted over to sit on his lap, the floor becoming uncomfortable now that she had spent so much time there. Both of them were used to stone, though. With his arms around her waist and the prickle of his skin - little warmth, little texture, no heartbeat - she could have been back in the pit, clarified and terrified and held.  
  
    “Such generous gifts. Ornamented also?” A buzz against her neck might be her own gooseflesh, might be his lips, might be the night breeze through the open window. The floor was uncomfortable against her hipbones and so she rose to her feet, alone for a moment. Had he left her? Had the Light flowed in just such a way as to tuck him under?  
  
    She spoke to the plane where she could always find him, unconcerned for whether he could hear. “No. That one is purified, but otherwise unchanged.”  
  
    A chill breeze like a disdainful kiss swept up from behind her, stirring her hair and her clothes. The Dark whispered of focused approval, and just a tinge of disappointment. That last was, like everything and his death had been, for show.  
  
    “Your disappointment is an afterthought,” she whispered. "Still putting on a face to impress."  
  
    The specter of Toland agreed, not a whisper but a confession. Hands made of smoke clasped hers and disappeared.  
  
    Eris Morn sat on hard ground and felt at home.

 


End file.
